The Land of Enchantment in 1983. The piece is also reproduced in Silver Bullet, the movie tie-in for
the film version of Cycle (more of which later).
Introduction—Skeleton Crew (1985)
King wrote the Introduction to his second short story collection on 15 April 1984 in Bangor,
Maine. The piece is composed of five sections.
The first begins with a rather tongue-in-cheek statement, ‘Here’s some more short stories, if you
want them.’ He notes the stories were written over a 17 year period between the ‘summer before I
started college’ (1966— The Reaper’s Image) and November 1983 (The Ballad of the Flexible
Bullet).
In the second section King, reliving some of his early sales, says he was just as glad of the
twelve contributor’s copies that were his ‘payment’ for the Ubris version of Here There Be Tygers
or the few dollars he received for his men’s magazine contributions (particularly their ability to pay
overdue bills) as the $2000 he received for The Word Processor from Playboy. Showing his dry
sense of humor he says, ‘I am of a kindly nature and have always assumed that Ubris was a cockney
way of spelling hubris.’ ‘All the same, you don’t do it for money, or you’re a monkey...In the end you
don’t even do it for love, although it would be nice to think so. You do it because to not do it is
suicide.’
King briefly dwells on the nature of a short story in the third section: ‘… a short story is like a
quick kiss in the dark from a stranger. That is not, of course, the same thing as an affair or a marriage,
but kisses can be sweet, and their very brevity forms its own attraction.’ He also reveals that writing
short stories had gotten harder for him over the years (‘they keep wanting to bloat...I have a real
problem with bloat—I write like fat ladies diet.’)
Acknowledgements are the subject of the fourth section—Bill Thompson, by this time at Arbor
House; Phyllis Grann at Putnam; his agent, Kirby McCauley (‘who pulled “The Mist” out of me with
a chain fall’); ‘this is starting to sound like an Academy Awards acceptance speech’; and a group of
the magazine editors who had bought the stories originally. Finally the Constant Reader (‘Without you
it’s a dead circuit.’). The fifth section sets the CR on the trail—‘Grab onto my arm now. Hold tight.
We are going into a number of dark places, but I think I know the way. Just don’t let go of my arm.
And if I should kiss you in the dark, it’s no big deal; it’s only because you are my love. / Now listen:’
Notes—Skeleton Crew (1985)
King also delivers a set of Notes about some of the stories included in this collection; most
describe the genesis of the tale. The novella The Mist was written for a collection edited by King’s
agent, Kirby McCauley and was inspired by a storm (‘much as described in the story...there was
indeed a waterspout’) on Long Lake at Bridgton, Maine when the King family lived there. King notes
he ‘never liked it much until the rewrite’, which was for Skeleton Crew; and that the character
Stephanie Drayton is named after Tabitha King’s sister—Stephanie Leonard.
Here There Be Tygers was inspired by King’s ‘pretty scary’ first-grade teacher; The Monkey by
a man selling wind-up toys on a New York street; Mrs. Todd’s Shortcut by Tabitha’s habits (‘the
woman really is mad for a shortcut...And Tabby really does seem to be getting younger
sometimes....’). Of this tale King says three women’s magazines refused it (‘two because of the line
about how a woman will pee down her own leg if she doesn’t squat’). The Jaunt was originally for
Omni, ‘which quite rightly rejected it because the science is so wonky.’
Perhaps the most interesting note is about The Raft. He wrote the story in 1968 as “The Float”
and sold it in 1969 to Adam magazine, which paid only on publication, not acceptance. Relating his
arrest and conviction for petty larceny in 1970103 (‘I was my own attorney and did indeed have a fool
for a client’), he says the fine was $250, which he did not have. Failure to pay within a week would
result in 30 days in the county jail but, three days later, a check for exactly the amount required
arrived from Adam, for The Float. Despite Adam’s policy of paying only on publication King never
saw the magazine; later he lost the original manuscript; and found himself rewriting the tale in 1981.
He then appeals for anyone who may have a copy or have seen the story in published form to contact
him. No one ever has and King researchers currently assume the story never made it to print.
Survivor Type came about when King was mulling cannibalism one day (‘because that’s the sort
of thing guys like me sometimes think about...anyway, I started to wonder if a person could eat
himself....’); Uncle Otto’s Truck was based on a real truck and a real house; and The Reach104 by a story Tabitha’s younger brother, Tommy (a Coast Guardsman) told about a real-life Stella Flanders,
who never left her Maine island for the mainland, at least while alive.
The note about The Reach was excerpted as Note from the Author in Maine Contemporary
Fiction: An Anthology of Short Stories (2005), edited by Wesley McNair, in which the story was
reprinted.
Why I Was Bachman—The Bachman Books (1985)
From the original publication of The Bachman Books omnibus in 1985 through 1995, this piece
was effectively the Introduction to the volume, which first collected Rage, The Long Walk,
Roadwork and The Running Man. In 1996 it was replaced by an updated piece, The Importance of
Being Bachman (covered later in this chapter) but only in the United States (it still appears in United
Kingdom editions). Unusually, the original version was reprinted in The Stephen King Desk
Calendar 2006, a Doubleday Book Club publication only made available to subscribers of Book-of-
the-Month Club’s The Stephen King Library.
Those with a specific interest in the provenance of Bachman and ‘his’ novels should read this
piece but it is otherwise unremarkable (one almost feels King was somewhere else when penning its
six pages—he effectively confirmed this in the second introduction, eleven years later). Some
interesting facts are divulged— Misery was planned as a Bachman original until that gentleman died
of ‘cancer of the pseudonym’; and The Running Man, ‘which may be the best of them’, was written in
seventy-two hours and published virtually unchanged —but this piece is not nearly as revelatory as
one would expect.
Foreword—Silver Bullet (1985)
Silver Bullet was released in 1985 as the movie tie-in for the film version of Cycle of the
Werewolf. There were only two trade paperback printings of the book; it is now out of print but can
be obtained occasionally from online or other secondhand booksellers. It contains King’s novella
Cycle of the Werewolf (including the Afterword dealt with earlier); a new Foreword by the author;
the final draft of King’s SilverBullet screenplay; and an eight page movie photo section.
This lengthy Foreword, written in Bangor on February 12, 1985, only appears in this volume
and is therefore rarely read by King fans. It is in two parts, the first detailing the genesis and creation
of Cycle of the Werewolf and the second dealing with the creation of the movie from that tale.
‘ Silver Bullet is probably the only movie ever made that began as a calendar proposal,’ King
says, detailing the idea Christopher Zavisa pitched to a ‘drunk’ King, while both were attending the
1979 World Fantasy Convention in Providence, Rhode Island. The author agreed to write a series of
monthly vignettes, which would be combined with paintings by Berni Wrightson105 to create a
calendar. King opines that, apart from being inebriated, he was inclined to agree to a small project in
part to atone for his financial success in the face of such legends and pioneers of horror fiction
attending the Convention as Frank Belknap Long, Robert Bloch (to whom, among others, Danse
Macabre is dedicated) and Fritz Leiber.
As he worked the calendar/vignette model around the tale he’d developed of a werewolf
terrorizing a small town King felt constrained by the 500 word per month limit. Writing the July
installment in Puerto Rico in February 1981 the story suddenly took off, ‘And what happens at the
best times happened then: I could see ahead of what I was writing to all the things I would write, and
I could see backward to all the things I would fix up.’ Returning to Maine King rang Zavisa to report
the calendar project was dead; Zavisa proposed a ‘slim book’ instead (‘he said it with such real
enthusiasm that I wondered if it wasn’t what he had sort of wanted all along....’).
In the second part King tells of his relationship with the movie producer, Dino DeLaurentiis.
Having bought the rights to The Dead Zone Dino ‘charmed’ King into writing the screenplay (it was
later discarded; and King’s choice of actor for Johnny Smith—Bill Murray, of all people—also
failed to come to pass; ‘No matter; it turned out to be a pretty damned good picture anyway.’). King
says that, although he never asked DeLaurentiis why he kept buying King’s work for the screen, he
thinks it ‘may be because we share many of the same interests: an urge to entertain people; a rather
childish interest in the largeness of effect; the idea that simple stories may be the best ones; a
sentimental belief that most people are good and that, in general, cowardice tends to be a scarcer
commodity than bravery when the chips are down.’
In early 1984 King proposed Cycle of the Werewolf to DeLaurentiis and a week later they had
an agreement; he did not expect (or have the time) to write the script but ended up agreeing (‘I’m still
not entirely sure how he did it; I think it was a form of benign hypnotism’).
In closing King says he likes the screenplay ‘a lot, and that’s why I’ve allowed it to be reprinted
here.’ By 1999 it was apparent he did not like the movie nearly as much, writing in the Introduction
to Storm of the Century, ‘the movies have been pretty good to me, by and large (let’s just ignore such
films as Graveyard Shift and Silver Bullet).’
In fact, King publishing a screenplay is most unusual. The only other instances are the original
mini-series Storm of the Century (as the only stand-alone screenplay published, in 1999); Sorry,
Right Number, in Nightmares & Dreamscapes (1993); and General (the wraparound segment of
Cat’s Eye) in the Richard Chizmar edited Screamplays (1997).
Argument—The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987)
This is the first of the ‘Arguments’ King uses to set the scene for readers at the beginning of
volumes two to five of the Dark Tower novels. Perhaps realizing that, by Song of Susannah, readers
were already walking the trails with Roland, King discontinued the use of the Argument for the last
two novels, titling the piece in Wolves of the Calla, The Final Argument. He had used a similar
technique to introduce the latter four parts of The Gunslinger as they appeared in The Magazine of
Fantasy and science-fiction (see the sections covering each Synopsis earlier in this chapter).
King writes: ‘We know that Roland was forced to an early trial of manhood after discovering
that his mother had become the mistress of Marten, a much greater sorcerer than Walter [aka The Man
in Black] (who, unknown to Roland’s father is Marten’s ally)....’ The same statement appears in the
Argument for The Dark Tower III: The Waste Lands. When he revised the first volume of the Cycle,
The Gunslinger, partly to have it fit with the events that occurred in later volumes, Walter/The Man
in Black and Marten became the same character. By the end of The Dark Tower readers come to
know that this creature is also known as Walter O’Dim, Walter Padick (his birth name), Randall
Flagg (and, in just the faintest of possibilities, John Farson).
He also says of Jake, ‘A boy who was, in fact, pushed from a street-corner by the ubiquitous
(and iniquitous) man in black.’ This hints that King, at least at one point, intended Walter/Marten
(thereby Flagg) to have been the actual killer of Jake Chambers. In fact we know from the very
volume King is introducing here that it is, in fact, Jack Mort who pushed Jake to his first death (Mort
had earlier pushed Odetta Holmes in front of a train). In The Pusher section of The Drawing of the
Three Roland entered Jack Mort (‘Jack Mort didn’t feel a thing. He was too intent on the boy...Today
he was going to push him’); Roland recognized ‘The boy was Jake’ and proceeded to save Jake’s
life, which led to other consequences best considered another time. Roland realized Jake had been
murdered before appearing in Roland’s world and thought he had been ‘Pushed by the man in black’.
Just before ‘coming forward’ and stopping Mort from pushing Jake Roland thought, ‘What if the body
he entered was itself that of the man in black?’ It becomes very clear to both Roland and Reader later
in The Pusher that Mort is no such thing, and he dies after Roland forces him to jump in front of a
train.
On the other hand it seems Walter was actually present when Jake died (and Jake himself
mistakenly thought he was the killer), with this from The Gunslinger: ‘… he sees the man who kills
him out of the corner of his eye. It is the man in black, and he doesn’t see his face, only the swirling
robe, the outstretched hands....’ and as he lay in the street: ‘He sees the black robe and knows sudden
horror. It is him, the man in black. He turns his face away...Looking at his hand, Jake dies.’ King
revised this passage slightly when he reworked The Gunslinger so that it now reads ‘...the swirling
robe, the outstretched hands, and the hard, professional grin’ yet did not alter the section with Jake
turning his face from Walter (Mort?) and still looking at his hand as he dies. So, still confusion. Is this
simply in Roland’s mind, or in King’s? One of the joys/frustrations of the Dark Tower Cycle are
these unresolved anomalies. One explanation is the nature of the King macroverse itself—there are so
many levels of time and space in/around the Dark Tower that every possible series of events and
timelines can play out in every physical reality. Perhaps we really are reading of two separate
attempts on Jake’s life—one successful at the hands of Walter; and one by Mort, averted by Roland’s
interference?
We continue this debate later in this chapter, in Argument— The Dark Tower III: The Waste
Lands.
Afterword—The Dark Tower II: The Drawing of the Three (1987)
King opens this short piece, written on December 1, 1986, saying the novel ‘completes the
second of six or seven books which make up a long tale called The Dark Tower’ (it would eventually
be seven, of course) and says of the next two volumes: ‘The third, The Waste Lands, details half of
the quest of Roland, Eddie, and Susannah to reach the Tower; the fourth, Wizard and Glass, tells of
an enchantment and a seduction but mostly of things which befell Roland before his readers first met
him upon the trail of the man in black.’
He also writes of his surprise at the ‘acceptance’ of The Gunslinger ‘which is not at all like the
stories for which I am best known....’ Tellingly, he says ‘This work seems to be my own Tower, you
know; these people really haunt me, Roland most of all.’ Of course, they really would haunt a Stephen
King in Song of Susannah, and save the life of that same man in The Dark Tower. Less accurately,
King encourages the reader to ‘prepare yourself for the very real possibility that he [Roland] will not
be the one to’ reach the Tower.
Untitled—Misery (1987)
This short note by ‘S.K.’ to his novel of addiction acknowledges three medicos who helped
King with facts for the novel, which involves the use of drugs, surgery (if you can call it that) and the
recovery of a victim from a major accident. They are: Russ Dorr (previously acknowledged in The
Stand and Pet Sematary), Florence Dorr (Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption is
dedicated to both Dorrs106), and Janet Odway (a psychiatrist). King says, ‘If you see a glaring error,
it’s mine.’
Untitled—The Tommyknockers (1987)
This one page piece is effectively an Author’s Note to King’s major science-fiction novel. The
author (now reverting to ‘Stephen King’ after recent notes in his novels as ‘S.K.’) refers to the origin
of the word ‘Tommyknockers’; thanks a variety of people; and closes with his trademark humor.
Webster’s Unabridged says Tommyknockers are either ‘tunneling ogres’ or ‘ghosts which haunt
deserted mines or caves’ and King refers to a possible British origin, through the Army term ‘tommy’.
He also says the first verse of a ditty is ‘common enough for my wife and myself to have heard it as
children, although we were raised in different towns [both in the then isolated state of Maine],
different faiths, and came from different descendants—hers primarily French, mine Scots-Irish.’ He
also states that ‘All other verses are products of the author’s imagination.’ The page facing this note
reads:
Late last night and the night before,
Tommyknockers, Tommyknockers,
knocking at the door.
I want to go out, don’t know if I can,
‘cause I’m so afraid
of the Tommyknocker man.
—TRADITIONAL
King thanks Tabitha—‘an invaluable if sometimes maddening critic (if you get mad at critics,
you almost always can be sure they are right)’; and others including George Everett McCutcheon,
‘who has read each of my novels and vetted it carefully—primarily for weapons and ballistics
reasons, but also for his attention to continuity.’ McCutcheon (‘Mac’) died of leukemia and King
heard of the passing while he was making corrections based on one of his notes—‘I miss him terribly,
not because he helped me fix things but because he was part of my heart’s neighborhood.’ Lastly,
King credits Stephen Jay Gould (the brilliant paleontologist, evolutionary biologist and historian of
science, now also dead, of lung cancer) for comments on the possibilities of what King calls ‘dumb
evolution’ which ‘helped to shape the redraft of this novel’. Gould, like King, was a huge baseball
fan, and King notes, ‘Although he is a Yankee fan, and thus not entirely to be trusted....’107
He closes, ‘The Tommyknockers are real. / If you think I’m kidding, you missed the nightly
news.’
Author’s Note—The Dark Half (1989)
Another short one: ‘I’m indebted to the late Richard Bachman for his help and inspiration. This
novel could not have been written without him. / S.K.’
This is rather obviously a tip to the Stephen King/Richard Bachman interplay that inspired the
Thad Beaumont/George Stark relationship portrayed in the novel.
Afterword—The Dark Half (1989)
In the Afterword to this novel ‘S.K.’ notes that the name of Alexis Machine (George Stark’s
character) is not original to King but, in fact, the name of a fictional crime boss in Dead City by
Shane Stevens (King thought it ‘so perfectly summed up the character of George Stark and his
fictional crime boss that I adopted it....’). He also notes use of the name is hommage to Stevens,
saying his three novels Rat Pack, By Reason of Insanity and The Anvil Chorus are ‘three of the finest
novels ever written about the dark side of the American dream.’ King recommends them
‘unreservedly...but only readers with strong stomachs and stronger nerves need apply.’
Author’s Note—The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition (1990)
This note is a significant revision of the Author’s Note that appeared in the original 1980 edition
of this classic novel. King notes that the book is a work of fiction and that he has ‘taken the liberty of
changing’ real places that appear in it to suit ‘the course of my fiction.’ He hopes that readers who
live in these places ‘will not be too upset by my “monstrous impertinence,” to quote Dorothy Sayers,
who indulged freely in the same sort of thing.’
The same people who were originally thanked remain in place and the note (as was the original)
is signed ‘S.K.’
A Preface in Two Parts—The Stand: The Complete & Uncut Edition (1990)
As the title of this piece suggests it is presented in two parts—the first To Be Read Before
Purchase and the second To Be Read After Purchase. Both detail the reasons why King ‘restored’
The Stand in a Complete & Uncut Edition, twelve years after the novel was originally published;
and the results of the restoration.
He suggests the potential buyer read the first part before buying the book as ‘this is not a new
novel’ nor is it ‘a brand-new, entirely different version’; rather it is ‘an expansion of the original
novel’ in which the original characters can be observed ‘doing more things’ and ‘if I didn’t think
some of those things were interesting...I would never have agreed to this project.’
The second part, presuming the reader bought the book and read on, explains why the first
version was cut (the accounting department at Doubleday wanted a cover price that effectively
dictated the elimination of approximately 400 pages of manuscript; King chose to do the ‘cutting’
himself, refusing what was surely an outrageous offer from the publisher that ‘someone in the
editorial department’ do it); and why King felt there was value in restoring them. Skirting around the
argument of certain critics that the book was too long in the original version (we doubt King fans
would agree) he says he would not offer this longer version ‘… if I myself didn’t think those portions
which were dropped from the original manuscript made the story a richer one....’
In restoring the tale to its original glory, ‘I haven’t restored all four hundred of the missing
pages; there is a difference between doing it up right and just being downright vulgar. Some of what
was left on the cutting room floor...deserved to be left there, and there it remains....’; and argues that
the restoration of Frannie Goldsmith’s confrontation with her mother and the portions concerning The
Kid add richness, dimension and counterpoint.
King states, ‘...I am republishing ‘The Stand’ as it was originally written....’ and, of course, that
first version was published in 1978. Freddy Krueger is referred to at the end of the Uncut Chapter 11.
The first Nightmare on the Elm Street movie was produced in 1984. There is also a reference
(without actually naming her) to Bobbi Anderson, a character who appeared first in The
Tommyknockers in 1987. In these cases more was added to the manuscript, rather than simple
restoration. There are dozens of examples of this, meaning that the true Uncut version (or Original
Uncut, if you will) has never been published. King clarified this matter in his Foreword to the
Revised and Expanded Edition of The Gunslinger: ‘What I reinstated in the late eighties were
revised sections of the pre-existing manuscript. I also revised the work as a whole, mostly to
acknowledge the AIDS epidemic....’
He closes this piece, written on October 24, 1989, with a telling description of The Stand:
‘Finally, I write for only two reasons: to please myself and to please others. In returning to this long
tale of dark Christianity, I hope I have done both.’
Straight Up Midnight: An Introductory Note—Four Past Midnight (1990)
King wrote this first introductory piece to his collection Four Past Midnight in Bangor in the
late July of 1989. It deals loosely with the nature of time and the reception for King’s earlier
collection, also of four novellas, Different Seasons: ‘Most readers...wanted to tell me that one of the
stories roused their emotions in some way, made them think, made them feel, and those letters are the
real payback for the days (and there are a lot of them) when the words come hard and inspiration
seems thin or nonexistent.’
He also provides this interesting insight: ‘I know writers who claim not to read their notices, or
not to be hurt by the bad ones if they do...I’m one of the other kind—I obsess over the possibility of
bad reviews and brood over them when they come. But they don’t get me down for long; I just kill a
few children and old ladies, and then I’m right as a trivet again.’ And this: ‘I still believe in the
resilience of the human heart and the essential validity of love; I still believe that connections
between people can be made...I still believe, I suppose, in the coming of the White and in finding a
place to make a stand...and defending that place to the death. They are old-fashioned concerns and
beliefs, but I would be a liar if I did not admit I still own them. And that they still own me.’
King writes that, ‘Because a great many readers seem curious about where stories come from, or
wonder if they fit into a wider scheme the writer may be pursuing, I have prefaced each of these with
a little note about how it came to be written.’ The notes are presented as an increasing number of
minutes after midnight.
One Past Midnight: A note on ‘The Langoliers’—Four Past Midnight (1990)
The first of these notes (the lowercase for the first letter in ‘note’ is King’s) is for The
Langoliers. The inspiration for this story was an image the author had ‘of a woman pressing her hand
over a crack in the wall of a commercial jetliner’, combined with his later realization ‘that this
woman was a ghost’. The story was written over a one-month period. King credits three pilots for
their assistance and says (as always) that he alone is responsible for any errors: ‘Factual mistakes
usually result from a failure to ask the right question and not from erroneous information.’ He also
states that because the story ‘had an apocalyptic feel similar’ to The Mist, he chose to head each
chapter ‘in the same old-fashioned rococo way.’
Two Past Midnight: A note on ‘Secret Window, Secret Garden’—Four Past Midnight
(1990)
In this note King says that, over the previous four years, he had reached a period of ‘cloture’, a
term used by psychologists to describe a ‘time in which we end things’. ‘It’s as apparent in my work
as anywhere else. In It, I took an outrageous amount of space to finish talking about children and the
wide perceptions which light their interior lives.’ He goes on to say he’s written the ‘last’ Castle
Rock novel, Needful Things and claims that Secret Window, Secret Garden is ‘the last story about
writers and writing and the strange no-man’s land which exists between what’s real and what’s make
believe.’ While it is still the case that Needful Things is the last Castle Rock novel, Bag of Bones
went perilously close to joining that classification; and that very novel is very much about a writer
and writing, as have been a number of other later stories.
As to the inspiration for Secret Window, King notes he had begun to consider writing ‘a secret
act—as secret as dreaming’ and discovered a previously unnoticed view from his laundry room into a
small internal garden, hence the story’s title. The phrase itself seemed to King to be a metaphor for
writing—the ‘spiritual analogue’ for the physical act of writing ‘is looking out of an almost forgotten
window, a window which offers a common view from an entirely different angle...an angle which
renders the common extraordinary.’
This piece is also reprinted in the Book Club collection, Secret Windows: Essays and Fiction
on the Craft of Writing (2000).
Three Past Midnight: A note on ‘The Library Policeman’—Four Past Midnight (1990)
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